1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to communications. More specifically, this invention relates to a communications interface between two or more disparate systems.
2. Description of Related Art
Public crisis events (such as natural disasters or terrorist actions) may demand responses by several public safety agencies, including police, firefighters, and medical and rescue services. In order for these agencies to deploy their services more effectively and remediate the situation more quickly, it is critical to establish command and control communications with as little delay as possible. Therefore, it is desirable at least for the commanders of first response agencies to be able to communicate with one another in order to coordinate their operations at the scene. Unfortunately, a lack of interoperability (i.e. useable connectivity) between the communications apparatus of many such organizations often impedes such cooperation in practice. A similar deficiency may arise when military units require real-time transfer of information but utilize dissimilar radio-frequency bands and/or modulation schemes.
A proposed solution to this problem is a central device to receive all of the various RF signals and rebroadcast them over the appropriate RF bands. Such a device, however, is large and bulky, must be transported rather than carried, requires the on-site availability of significant power resources, requires highly trained personnel to set up and operate, and is expensive both to purchase and to maintain. A portable and rapidly deployable device that provides such interoperability has not yet existed, much less a device that has such features combined with ease of operation and low cost.
An interface according to an embodiment of the invention includes a number of input/output (I/O) ports, a corresponding number of voice-operated-transmit (VOX) circuits, and a switching matrix.